Underwater Cities; Noah's Flood Proof? ... Page 4

Another Submerged City Found

"The whole model of the origins of civilization with which
archaeologists have
been working will have to be remade from scratch..."
Another Submerged City ..
21-Jan-2002

The remains of a huge underwater city off the western coast of India
may force
historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of
ancient
human history. It's believed that the area was submerged when ice
caps melted
at the end
of the last ice age, 9-10,000 years ago.

Click and Drag Photo to Resize. Image Source:hindunet.org

Marine scientists say archaeological remains disco
vered 120 feet underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast
of India
could be over 9,000 years old. The vast city - which is five miles
long and
two miles wide - is believed to predate the oldest known remains in
the
subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.

The site was discovered by chance last year by oceanographers from
India's
National Institute of Ocean Technology who were conducting a survey
of
pollution. Using sidescan sonar - which sends a beam of sound waves
down to
the bottom of the oce
an - they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120
feet.

Debris recovered from the site - including construction material,
pottery,
sections of walls, beads, sculpture and human bones and teeth - has
been
carbon dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old.

Click and drag Photo to resize

Photo:sidescan Radar of City remains.

However, archaeologist Justin Morris from the British Museum says
more work
will need to be done before the site can be said to belong to a 9,000
year old
civilization, since there can be errors in carbon dating. "Culturally
speaking,
in that part of the world there were no civilizations prior to about
2,500
BC. What's happening before then mainly consisted of small, village
settlements," he says.

Strong tides make investigations in the Cambay difficult. Marine
scientists
led by the Madras-based National Institute of Ocean Technology are
solving
this problem by taking acoustic images off the sea-bed and using
dredging
equipment to extract artifacts.

The Indian Minister for Ocean Technology, Murli Manohar Joshi, says
the images indicate symmetrical man-made structures and also a paleo-river, with banks
containing artifacts, such as pottery. Carbon dating on a block of
wood
brought up from the depths suggests it dates back to 7,595 BC.

"We
have to
find out what happened then ... where and how this civilisation
vanished," he
says.

The city is believed to be even older than the ancient Harappan
civilisation,
which dates back around 4,000 years and is the oldest on the
subcontinent.
Although Palaeolithic sites dating back around 20
,000 years have been found on the coast of India's western state of
Gujarat
before, this is the first time that man-made structures as old as
9,500 years
have been found deep beneath the ocean surface.

Click and Drag Photo to Resize. Image Source:hindunet.org

Marine archaeologists have used a technique known as sub- bottom
profiling to
show that the buildings were built on enormous foundations. Graham
Hancock,
author of "Fingerprints of the Gods," says, "The [oceanographers]
found that
they were dealing with two large blocks of apparently man made
structures.

Cities on this scale are not known in the archaeological record until
roughly
4,500 years ago when the first big cities begin to appear in
Mesopotamia.
Nothing else on the scale of the underwater cities of Cambay is
known. The
first cities of the historical period are as far away from these
cities as we
are today from the pyramids of Egypt."

Hancock feels this discovery could have a major influence on our view
of the
ancient world.

"There's a huge chronological problem in this
discovery. It
means that t
he whole model of the origins of civilization with which
archaeologists have
been working will have to be remade from scratch," he says.